Revolt of a TV Genius

Joss Whedon's new series, "Dollhouse", was supposed to be his triumphant return to television. Instead, the creator of "Buffy the Vampire Slayer" says he's quitting TV for good

DAVID KUSHNER

Posted Feb 19, 2009 9:00 AM

Joss Whedon, the George Lucas of television, is standing on the set of his first new series in six years and dismissing the very medium he helped to revolutionize. "I don't see myself creating another TV show," Whedon says between takes on Dollhouse, a dark, quirky fantasy he created that debuts February 13th on Fox. "I'm beginning to wonder how viable the medium of television, as it's run right now, will be a few years down the road."

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It's a sign of how bad things are for TV that Whedon — the genius behind Buffy the Vampire Slayer, the pop-drenched fantasy that gave birth to a generation of shows from Charmed to Heroes — thinks it may not have a future. And it's not just because of the problems he's encountered on Dollhouse, which has been beset by production delays and network meddling. It's because television's business model, Whedon believes, has been irreparably broken by overblown budgets and the Internet.

But while the networks grope for answers to their woes, Whedon has quietly pioneered an alternative model. During the writers' strike last year, he paid family and friends out of his own pocket to create Dr. Horrible's Sing-Along Blog, a goofy, homemade musical series about a wanna-be supervillain. "I was very interested in the idea of making things on the cheap, with the people that I love and trust," he says. "It's a whole new way to create content."

What began as a lark turned into something far bigger: the first series in history to find an audience and make money entirely online — outselling every TV show on iTunes in the weeks after its release. "Dr. Horrible is generating tremendous excitement among people like me," says Tim Kring, the creator of Heroes. "It clearly represents that there is a different model outside the traditional network for creating content and reaching a fan base. We've all been trying to figure out what these models will look like, and he just went out and did it."

It's no small thing for Whedon, a third-generation television writer, to be looking beyond TV. His grandfather wrote for Leave It to Beaver and The Andy Griffith Show, and his dad spent years on hits like The Golden Girls and The Electric Company. "I learned about stories from him, but I also learned about business," says Whedon, as he grabs some lunch on the Fox set in Los Angeles. "My dad always said, 'Read your contract — and look out for yourself.'"

Whedon took the advice to heart. With Buffy, he established the business template that every breakout hit from Lost to The Dark Knight now follows. He worked the blogs and courted the geeks at ComicCon years before anyone else, and he was the first to push his TV characters into the realm of novels and comic books. His fans pay tribute to the "Buffyverse" in online social networks and at conventions dedicated to Whedon — and they stage uprisings when their hero is wronged. In 2002, after Fox canned Whedon's sci-fi Western, Firefly, fans orchestrated a protest against the network. Thanks to the outcry, Fox signed up Whedon to write and direct Serenity, a movie spinoff of Firefly.

But the debacle left Whedon reeling. To this day, he feels bitter that the network never gave the show a chance — refusing to allow him to film in widescreen, airing episodes out of order. "Firefly changed me," Whedon says quietly, picking at his lunch. "It wounded me in a way that I'll never get over. I know that sounds melodramatic. It's not like, you know, I lost my face, but I'll never get over it."

Whedon was coaxed back into television in September 2007, when he got a call from the actress Eliza Dushku, who had just struck a deal for a new show with Fox. Over lunch in Santa Monica, she begged Whedon to help. "We started talking about the Internet," Dushku recalls, "and ended up talking about fetishes." Whedon came up with the Dollhouse concept on the spot: Dushku would be an unwitting agent-for-hire named Echo. Like other members of a mysterious group called the Actives, her personality would be programmed to serve the needs of rich clients, only to have her memory erased after each assignment.

Fox, in need of a hit, was thrilled. "I thought there was no way he was coming back," Kevin Reilly, the entertainment president of Fox Broadcasting, gushed at the time. Whedon was optimistic. "I just had a really good feeling," he says. "I felt like we were all on the same page."

But from the start, things went wrong. Whedon wanted Dollhouse to be introspective and emotional; Fox pushed for more screaming and guns. "It went well at first," Whedon says. "Then it went not so well. And the not-so-well is about them going, 'You know, we don't really have room for these kinder, more contemplative stories.'"

Though his geeky male fans might imagine Whedon curled up at home with a Watchmen comic, he calls gender studies and feminism, which he studied in college, "the real interest of my life" and feels a personal responsibility to "bring the world up to the fact that women are not lesser physically or morally incomplete beings."

In Dollhouse, Echo is a fucked-up ingénue in a twisted scheme. Her only way out is to discover her true identity and strength, just as Buffy had to find the courage to slay the demons who plagued her. But Fox didn't care about the feminist subtext — it wanted to crank up the volume. Whedon tried rewriting and re-shooting, but it was no good. "I knew Kevin Reilly would look at it and go, 'You have to be fucking kidding me,' " Whedon says. He was right. Fed up with the interference, Whedon shut down production of the show in September, after only two episodes had been shot. "I no longer know what you're going for," he told the network.

Production on the show resumed after two weeks, but the troubles continued. Whedon is a boyish-looking 44, but when I visit the set he looks rumpled and fretful, tugging at the buttons of his shirt until the threads break. Perhaps because of the competing visions for Dollhouse, the first few episodes lack the offbeat charm of Whedon's early work, that trademark combination of emotional depth and wisecracking geekiness. Frustrated by years of squabbling, Whedon decided that it would be his last TV show. The future, he felt, lay in the online series he had shot while the writers' strike held up work on Dollhouse. "With Dr. Horrible, I had a glimpse of the thing that we all strive for — which is to be able to make things the way you conceive them and not have them developed out of existence."

But Whedon had more ambitious goals for Dr. Horrible than just making a weird sci-fi musical. "I wanted to make a statement about the Internet — to say that people will watch this in whatever format it appears," he says. To make it work, he kept Dr. Horrible low-budget: He funded the $200,000 production himself, cashed in favors for what he couldn't afford and promised every actor a generous cut of any profit. Neil Patrick Harris agreed to play the starring role, a buddy's house was used as the doctor's lab, and a local laundromat served as another location.

Then Whedon took his biggest risk: He streamed the first three episodes online for free — a week before selling them on iTunes. To nearly everyone's surprise, the plan worked. Last July, in its first weeks on iTunes, Dr. Horrible occupied the top three spots on the TV-downloads list. Suddenly, Whedon was Hollywood's poster boy for popular — and profitable — online entertainment. "It proves that Internet video can be a place to experiment and attract an audience," says Bobby Tulsiani, a senior analyst with Forrester, a research firm.

Now, even if Dollhouse is a hit, Whedon plans to start what he calls a "microstudio" to produce and air stuff online. His goal, he says, is to "Roger Corman my way onto the Internet" — imitating the legendary director of B movies by creating material that is "cheap and fast and dirty."

During a break on the Dollhouse set, Whedon jokes that "all of my stories lately involve massive corporations that are destroying the wills of the people who work for them." But he is dead serious about his new business model. "If we don't start building this system ourselves, the studios will figure it out, and they'll own it," he says. "Then it'll be too late. It'll be another medium where we're not free to do it our way."

[From Issue 1072 — February 19, 2009]

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